#8 - Lewes History Journals

 After the disappointing end to the last post, I turn to this week’s topic: Lewes History, the Journal of the Lewes Historical Society. It covers all manner of historical topics on the town and surrounding areas. The authors are a mix of journalists, history enthusiasts, LHS volunteers, and academics. 

I picked up a few editions of the journal at the Ryves Holt House itself during my July 2018 trip. I have volumes 19, 20, and 21. These are extremely difficult to find, not just to buy, but also to read online. However, I found several excellent articles in these three volumes, I will discuss a few, but please visit https://www.historiclewes.org/ for more information about the journals and links therein to purchase copies.

The 19th volume of Lewes History was published in 2016 and covers many topics - spies, shipwrecks, and fishing to name a few. I especially found the article entitled: A Town By Any Other Name very helpful for my research of the RHH. The author, Bob Kotowski, a retired journalist and author, walks the reader through the many names involved with the town of Lewes and the surrounding areas. While he doesn’t disprove the ‘Zwaanendael’ theory I have, which is that it is a later, probably 19th or 20th century spelling; he does give a variation for Swanendael (Swanvale) that I find believable; it is probably the later English translation of the Dutch name. He also gives many spelling variations for Whorekill - Hoerenkil, Harlot’s Creek, Hoere Kill, etc. Kotowski states that Harlot’s Creek and Whorekill, being the English translations do perpetuate the erroneous story of Native women and Swanendael. He ends with listing variations of Lewes - Lewestown, Lewis, etc. This is all extremely helpful, because primary documents (and their modern metadata) could use any of these spellings to describe the place the RHH is standing in; it will hopefully make it easier for me to find references to Lewes/Whorekill in the future.

The 20th volume of LH was published in 2017, and focuses more on the later history of Lewes. Well, by some definitions of later - post Civil War. Still, I found the article by Dr. Katherine Henn about the Burton-Ingram house to be quite fascinating. It also has a framework I could use to structure my history of the RHH so the two could be useful together. The author is a volunteer at the Lewes Historical Society (of which the Burton-Ingram house belongs) and taught history and philosophy at the collegiate level before retiring. The article is meant to trace the personal history of the Burton and Ingram families in relation to their ownership of the house. The author does a good job of clarifying relationships between owners while carrying the story in an interesting way. Of course, as more of an architectural historian myself, I wish she had included more about the building’s history, too. 

The 21st volume is the third I own, from 2018. This one is great - it covers a lot of topics I am interested in. The first article is Lewes History in 20 Objects by Midge Yearley. She is also a volunteer at the LHS and formerly worked in historic preservation. She described a yellow Dutch Brick from circa 1630, and thus probably from the Swanendael colony. The brick was found in the 1950s during excavations at a fort built along the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal. This brick is distinctive, thus making it easy to date, it is ‘bezand Isselbrick.’ I will have to look up this brick to see if any information about it could be connected to the RHH, I should also look for any reports about the finding of the brick. The only fort I can think of in the area is Fort Miles, out on Cape Henlopen, rather a bit far away from the canal. Yearley then describes Philip Russell’s Tavern, AKA the RHH itself. She gives a specific date for Russell’s receipt of the license to run the tavern: September 28, 1685. Apparently, he lost the tavern due to issues with so-called lesser evils: card playing. He sold the building to William Godwin, then to Ryves Holt. This is interesting because the LHS cites the RHH as being from 1665, but if that is true, then who owned the building for the twenty years before Russell?

A second article from Volume 20 that I enjoyed is A City of Two Tales; The Unsolved Mystery of the Swanendael Colony. This is also written by Bob Kotowski! Here he describes the two stories of the Swanendael Colony, he starts with the typical narrative: a Dutch West India Company director, Samuel Godyn ‘purchases’ land from the local Siconese in June of 1629. In the Spring of 1631, 28 men arrived at the site of Swanendael to settle. One of these men is Gillis Hossett, the leader of the group which builds a brick structure surrounded by a wooden palisade with fields outside the walls. It is unknown what happened, but by March of 1632, the entire group was dead. David Pietersz de Vries, a WIC patroon and an organizer of Swanendael visited in December 1632 to find the entire colony destroyed; he published his recounting in 1655. Kotowski then tries to disprove the rest of the story, based on de Vries’ account. De Vries claims he heard the story of the massacre from a Siconese man, despite how unlikely it would have been for not just a Siconese man to tell the real story to a white man for the European to have believed a story told to him by a local. This helps to dispel the story about ‘Harlot’s Creek’ and the colonial narrative of native misunderstandings leading to overreactions and murder of European settlers. The rest of the article dismantles a couple of survivor rumors which originated in the late 19th and 20th century by writers trying to tie their family to the failed colony. This helps me understand how much mythology I will need to investigate when looking at the origins of the RHH. But it also makes the entire story of Swanendael even more interesting to me. What is it about mysteries - Roanoke, anyone - that makes people desire to be part of the story? 

The third article I liked from Volume 20 is A Week in the Life of a Young Boy in Lewes, February 11-18, 1776. This was written by William Manthorpe, who actually wrote the Archipedia articles about Lewes and the RHH I read back in post #4. The article is a little too close to historical fiction for me, but it was a fun read. Plus, the Young Boy in the title is Jacob Jones, an eventual owner of the RHH! The main take away from this article is the endnotes describing Ryves Holt’s connection to Jacob Jones. Jacob is the step-great grandson of Ryves. Jacob’s step-mother was Penelope Holt Jones, her mother was Penelope Holt Coward, and her parents were Ryves and Catherine Holt. Apparently PHC (Jacob’s step-grandmother) was a bit of black sheep. Catherine left the RHH to her granddaughter PHJ and thus to Jacob Jones. This helps to understand the timeline a lot, I had already been considering the potential for multiple Penelopes. These dates are from his endnotes:  Ryves Holt was born in 1696 and died in 1763, PHC was born in 1720, Jacob Jones was born in 1768. This means PHJ would have had to have been born sometime after 1740 to be the correct age to be step mother to Jacob. So there must be two Penelopes to fill in the timeline; before the 20th century, it actually was quite common for women to name their daughters after themselves, which makes things extremely confusing. Still, I will need to conduct some extra research to cross reference these dates and confirm the Dual Penelope Theory.

Journals from local historical societies can be a fun and interesting read. They do not often get much circulation, but they can have amazing gems. The LH journals have cleared up a few instances of confusion I have had so far in an easily accessible manner. They can also give a researcher an insight into the community around the subject, in my case I now have a few names for volunteers at the LHS and several passionate writers that could be helpful in finding more resources.

Next week I will talk about the next steps I want to take in my RHH research project. I will describe holes I have found so far and how I might try to fill them. The post after that will discuss the RHH narrative as I currently understand it. I will also debut a page on the blog specifically dedicated to the RHH story which I plan to update as I conduct more research.